Dock Boggs
The Real Country Blues

In 1963, Dock Boggs came out of retirement. He estimated his hiatus lasted twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty years. Maybe his fuzziness on the exact length of time was coyness, or alcohol induced memory fog. Maybe he just didn’t want to remember.

In his 73 years on (and in) the earth, Boggs spent 15 of them playing primal shots of black-influenced modal country blues like “Sugar Baby” and “Pretty Polly” for paying audiences. The rest of his life was spent working in the coal mines, or bootlegging, or leading Sunday School in his native Wise county. He drove a laundry truck for a year, selling his 78 records out of the side door. He spent a great deal of the time on the run — from the law, from his wife’s family and from his drinking.

He took three years out of the mines for music, cutting indelible sides with a national major label, Brunswick, as well as a locally owned independent, Lonesome Ace, earning up to $400 a week. Then the Depression hit and he had to sell back his own Ace records at wholesale prices, pawning his banjo for what was thought to be a short-term loan. He didn’t pick up another for, oh, 25, 30, 35, 40 years. He couldn’t afford to.

One writer said Boggs’ music sounded like his bones were coming through his skin. In retrospect, it is easy to assign the bleeding edge of his voice to a desperate urgency: He would only have a short time in the hailstorm of his life to sing what he wanted. There’s no way he could have known that he would live to see his own revival.

As he said simply to the man who rediscovered him in the ‘60’s, Mike Seeger, People were afraid. He was a man of the mines who didn’t know how long he had, and sometimes that hurt. Dock’s primal country blues still carry the sound of that pain.

Recommended on CD:
Dock Boggs — Country Blues: The Complete Early Recordings (Revenant)
Dock Boggs — Legendary Banjo Player and Singer (Folkways)

--- Originally published in 64 Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2001. For more information, log on at www.64magazine.org